I have ranked the top 68 television shows of the '00s, and will be presenting them, one-by-one, starting with 68 and working down. The rankings are more or less based on the show's popularity, it's cult status, it's critical acclaim, and my personal liking of it, with a heavy dose of arbitrariness added in. If a show was a big enough phenomena, I'll keep it on the list - but if I don't like it, I may drop it some spots. One other caveat - these are primetime shows (I apologize if I put a cable show that wasn't, I thought they were all primetime shows - the main point of this is just that no talk shows, no Colbert and Daily show that would be on otherwise).

31: Breaking Bad

Breaking Bad is probably my favorite drama on TV right now (though Mad Men is closing in with it's currently very strong season). The show improves over each of the first three seasons, with the third getting into the darkest, but the most interesting territory, not to mention the most exciting as well. The show also manages to trade off suspense and introspectivity (yeah it's probably not a word - I'm still using it) very well - late in the third season, there is a bottle episode which could easily have fallen flat but was very entertaining and seemed to fit within the context of the season.

The ending of the third season did something that's relatively rare for me in shows - got me excited enough about the possibilities that it makes me want to go online and read everything about what people thought about the episode, and the season - blog entries, comments, interviews with the creator (Oh, to think when I liked Lost, at the beginning this happened a bit). Even better, reading this stuff actually made me like the show more, rather than less. When I would go on to read about Lost opinions and theories, a little thought would make a lot of the initial excitement about the show lessen - it make a lot less sense after thinking about it. With Breaking Bad, reading about it pointed me in new directions and illuminated things I hadn't noticed - not just plot related, but ideas about the characters and the way the show is shot. I read one particular interview with the show's creator Vince Gilligan, and what he said about the way the show is written rang true - he said that they didn't, for the most part, plan out entire season arcs from the beginning - rather that they often wrote themselves into corners and then tried to write their way out of them. While that sounds like a recipe for disaster, it actually succeeds time and again over the course of the show - so many times I wondered how exactly they'd get out of a tricky situation without making it so the show couldn't continue anymore and they've cleverly, and plausibly within the boundaries of the show managed to work their way out.

Bryan Cranston's Walter White is a moving and nuanced protagonist up there with the best in TV - the Tony Sorpanos, the Don Drapers, though opposite of Draper, whose work life is honest (more or less), but family life is not, White does not mess around on his family, but his dishonest career comes up and screws with his family life anyway, no matter how much he tries to prevent it. Cranston and Aaron Paul as Jesse, the second principal character (Cranston's Christopher Moltisanti? Maybe a stretch...) both give excellent performances and create a really interesting relationship between the two characters - often it's portrayed that although Jesse is the career criminal, he's the one with the true heart of gold, while the socially awkward middle aged father career science teacher is the cold and inhuman one. Maybe that sounds cliche, and to put it in one sentence it is, but as it's shown over the course of three seasons, it a lot more subtle and complicated.

The one flaw the show has is the occasional unnecessary gimmick - the show is so strong already that sometimes it resorts to cheap tricks that it doesn't need to succeed. A couple of the gimmicky conceits really work well - I particularly loved Tuco's uncle who appeared in season 2 when Walt and Jesse were kidnapped, and could see them plotting, but could only hit his bell, rather than speak. Ones that don't work though include particularly the gimmick in which the end of the episode, or season (in the case of the second season) is shown at the beginning and we're left to wonder how it gets there. This doesn't add a whole lot to the show, and particularly in the case of the second season the whole airplane-crashed-by-Jane's-grieving-dad plot didn't do it for me (thought it wasn't so overwhelming as to ruin the show or anything) - it seemed out of place - but I'll chalk it up to not quite being able to paint out of one of those corners as well as they do it every other time (though the crash itself was fine - leading to the great scene of Walter explaining why there's no need to fret to his school's student body).